


The Art of Finding Reality

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, our reality, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-04-01 01:05:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4000114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Healing from a terrible accident, reality takes on a malleable quality and his dreams leak through to the real world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Finding Reality

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: some discussion of third degree burns and their treatment, but I tried to keep in vague. 
> 
> Note: The trope of Nux in the hospital is not mine. Check out the Nux/Capable tag for some great stories.

I die. 

I live. 

I die. 

And

his eyes cracked open, light poured in and there were flashes of silver, a rise of voices and then the dark again. 

I die. 

I 

I 

The burn unit was a place of infinite twilight. Consciousness more of a grudging suggestion than a permanent state. 

The dreams have texture and color so saturated it bled through into the waking world. He had a gun, he held the bedside rail, he climbed burning metal, he twisted in the sheets, he reached out for a hand, grabbed the button for the morphine drift. 

There’s a man with blood, spilling. It spills into him from him? Through him? Blood bag and calloused hands. 

A woman with steel wool and a steady stare and

“sorry, kiddo” 

the four hands have to hold him hard and he hates hates hates them

He loses his name for a few days. 

Pain trailed him no matter where he was, even the fantasy nightmare land couldn’t save him from third degree burns. 

There was a doctor though. A woman in a lab coat, wrapped in gauzy cloth. 

He loses her name along with his own, but she told him that was all right. To be expected. 

“She’s the best,” the woman with the steel hands whispered to him after she left. “You’re in very Capable’s hands.” 

His lips were too dry, cheeks ash. He couldn’t repeat the word or even make a broken hash of it. 

It followed him though. 

Her hair was copper bright in hypersunlight and he reached and her touch

softly  
softly 

in jagged metal hell

gentle now

go gentle

don’t go to gentle

the night is dark and full of fire 

“Hey, there, c’mon now. You’re heart is still strong, bud. Can’t fool me with this beat skipping crap.” 

“You need to drive,” wheel in his hands, hard and steady and 

tires rolling

gurney rolling

jostle jostle jostle jolts of pain jostle jostle jostle

“There you are, c’mon back here now, no one said you could go.” 

He lost five weeks to the haze of morphine, grafts and nightmares. To the four steady hands hard and kind 

and he hates the steel and he hates the needles and lean stripe of red

but the room for hate gets smaller, too small for the hands and the steel to fit, so he decides not to hate them. They’re trying with their bone and muscle to keep him from falling off the cliff. 

He narrows his hate to the pain and when he slips into the dream again, he’s behind the wheel. 

One night he stumbles raw over fields of shining salt, mounts a motorcycle and 

he’s in an office, spinning in an office chair, something ripped and bloody, but also joyful

“You’re laughing,” she’s beside him, worry painted large, but also a smile that crinkles her eyes. “How did you get here?” 

“Dunno,” his voice was raw, scrapped out and dragged across his salted tongue, but it was there, startling him. 

“You’re pretty strong,” she touches his forehead and she had done that before...waking? dreaming? “but this is going to open you to about a million infections. Can we get you back to bed?” 

“Capable,” he holds his hands out to her, but fingers go through her and into the man’s broad hands. 

“Nice job, kid,” he hears the grunt, can’t parse it. 

“Blood b’g?” 

“Yeah, blood. Someone worked hard to make that for you. Try not to go spilling it.” 

That was a lot of words, too many to swallow at once. 

Everyone talked less in the dream. Easier. 

But the dream was coming to an end now. Conversations petered through more and more. He could hear his nurses talking and they...names came. Different names that didn’t carry the tang of petrol and fire. 

He can’t quite say them, so they come out wrong, but no one corrects him. 

“The doc likes hers,” Max told him, changing a dressing. “Smart guy going for the brains.” 

“Zombie,” he touched his chest. His chest was spared. He knew where the pain lived now. Right side, knee to waist, right arm wrist to elbow. Hair gone from every inch, but he didn’t miss that. Didn’t feel it and never had much vanity to begin with. 

“Feels like it,” Max set the last of the dressing. “But you’ll feel better.” 

Furiosa kept her slurry name too. 

“Some things, you know belong to you,” she helped him get out of bed. They walk up and down the hall so slow, too slow. 

“Keeping you back.” 

“Takes a while to get where I need to go,” she corrected and then they were quiet, her in some deep way and he because he was concentrating on not falling into the hazy other world. 

“What did you do, before this?” her hands, Capable hands, poking and prodding, but he would allow her any invasion, his body a conquered country. 

“Wrote,” he mimed a keyboard with his left hand. The right still too stiff for more. Might forever be too stiff. 

“Journalist?” 

“No, too truthy,” he laughed, can do that now on purpose, chalky sound. 

“Fiction.” 

“Mmmm.” 

“Anything I might’ve read?” 

His eyes go wide with horror and she laughed. 

“What? Not my kind of books.” 

“Bad,” he tried to explain. Talking would get easier, they claimed as his lungs and throat healed. He would counter that he’d never been good at it. Words spilling onto paper, easy. Words out of lips? 

“Why bad?” She wrote something on a chart, but not like she usually did. Was she...lingering? 

“Junk for money. Never, mm... what I wanted. Junky junk.” 

“What did you want to write?” 

His eyes floated away from her on their own volition, seeking familiar cracks and dots in the ceiling that were also a map through uncharted vastness. 

“Heart stories. Second life stories.” 

“I like the sound of that.” 

The dream finally died the night his morphine drip ran dry. 

He dies and dies again and 

it was nearly like at that first moment, the crash that sent him flying here in a blaze of gasoline fire and screaming sirens that were terrible music pounding pounding 

and he dies and dies

but she smiles at him and somehow the taste of metal goes with the morphine too 

He wakes blank brained and cool skinned. 

“Almost free of us,” Max showed him how to fix his dressings. 

Furiosa helped into a wheelchair and showed him the outpatient wing where he would return for his physio and check ins. Check ins with another doctor, familiar and unplaceable all at once, dark eyes that looked wise and bitter and kind all at once. 

The day that his stay in the burn unit ended, stood up on his own two feet, but only loosely and there was a chair waiting for him. He clung to the railing of his stripped bed and chewed the bite of cake that came forth from Max’s bag. 

“Here,” Capable folded a piece of paper into his hand. “Let me know how you’re doing or I’ll worry.” 

He wanted to ask why, if he was...if she, but it would be stupid, it was just her business card probably and he stuffed it into his pocket. 

There was a cab and a bag full of medicine, Furiosa’s hands on his shoulders and Max running the palm of a hand over his scalp in benediction. 

His apartment, once full of roommates, empty now all of them taken in the accident that spared him. Letters were piled by the door, telling him about settlements and rent bills paid. The lawyer, there had been a lawyer, sly eyed and black toothed stuck strange in his memory, had told him about it. 

Dead head of state with a gallon of whiskey in his veins. A car full of dumb kids. A hand wave, a lean out the window and a rain slick road. 

He carefully tucks all the letters into a folder and the folder under a couch cushion. 

The water poured through his faucet and he stuck his head beneath it, gulping down, gulping in and letting it fall down his face to mingle with whatever else might fall. 

Then he found his computer, full charged and asleep after all this time. It had dozed like him in a dream state. 

Unlike him, it sprang awake when his fingers brushed over the keys. Left hand fine and right hand.

Right hand. He stared at the new new skin and the tough tough lines. Flex flex flex with the pattern of his breath and then set it down gently. Didn’t need much pressure, tip tip typing. 

Tell a story, boyo. 

Die, live, die, live, but tell the fucking story. What good was it to survive if there was nothing made from it? 

For days, he lived a new kind of half-life, diving in and out of the field of words that sank into his stomach and leaked into his veins. When he was out, he followed Max’s instructions and used Furiosa’s precise movements to keep his wounds safe and clean. 

Better now, he grew better. 

His story grew and he found his way to food and physio too. He took care, such care, after the dire tales of infection and rejection. 

Live to die to die to live, but fight like hell to survive. 

Only when the story was done and sat fallow and full as an udder did he dare to find the little piece of paper.

Unfolding unfolded

Her email. Personal with a flowing @ 

Capable at gmail dot com

Capable

He smiled, brought the card to his nose and his lips and let himself for a moment

for a moment he tasted something new, something less like survival and more like potential

Before he can let fear interfere, he type it in TO line and attached the story. 

_Subject: Hello, how are you, I wrote a thing_

_Body: Thank you. I wrote what I wanted. Would you like coffee?_

He knew her schedule was long and hard, didn’t expect a reply. 

Curled up on the couch as much as his body allowed, turned on the television and fell asleep to the bright light. 

He dreamed of water. 

Buzz in the morning of coffee and nerves, but he opened his computer with care and waited for the sharp bite of disappointment. 

_Subject: re: Hello, how are you, I wrote a thing_

_Body: Coffee would be amazing since I stayed up all night reading this. Brunch?_

A string of numbers that he had to blink into coherence. Fingers quickdial before he had time to consider. 

“There’s a place,” she mentioned and he nodded and would’ve agreed to eat rubber really. 

It was a nice place, he felt too dirty and damaged for the delicate chair, but she was waiting, her hands cupped around a giant mug of coffee and her eyes turned to him as he sat down. 

There was no music playing, but there was a beat heavy in his ears. 

She talked about the book, eyes wide as she recited plot points he had concocted and they sounded better from her mouth. To her, the pile of scenes resolved into a story about strength and winning back independence. 

To him it was a mess of things he couldn’t sort through, but he liked how she saw it. Said so. 

“I have to ask,” she bent forward, red spill of curls wafting the smell of good medicine between them. “What do you like to be called? The name on the manuscript it isn’t yours.” 

“More mine than the others,” he curved toward her, captured to speak. “Wasn’t born with one, more assigned by the agency that took me in. Grew up in a foster family. “ 

“Me too,” she slide her hand across the table, cupped it around his own. “My birth parents died when I was seven.” 

“Sorry,” he tilted his head, studied her again. How real she was, here in the cafe, in the sun, instead of the washing lights of the hospital. She was a real person, who touched him with affection. 

He turned his palm upward, settled his fingertips at her wrist and felt her pulse. 

“It was a long time ago.” 

They walked back to his apartment. He told her about his roommates, how their rooms sat still and empty and she had told him that wasn’t healthy. But there was no family, they had all come from the same foster farm and walked out with nearly nothing. 

She walked in his front door, stood on the filthy carpet and he flinched at the wreckage he’d left behind. 

“Do you like it here?” 

“No,” he pressed his hands to the doorframe. “Just a place.” 

“Hmm.” 

She took his computer, and sat down close beside him on the couch. Their thighs touched. 

She henpecked her way across the keyboard and he smothered a smile in her shoulder, relieved beyond measure when he wasn’t pushed away. 

“How did do medical school typing like that?”

“Because I’m an amazing doctor,” she grinned. “And I’ve got good handwriting.” 

They found a new place for him live, a small rentable house nearer to the hospital. 

“You could come by for lunch,” he offered, eyes on the tiny map. 

“Can you cook?”

“Do you like mac and cheese?”

She did. 

So did Max, who ate with an arm around the bowl like it might get stolen away. 

Furiousa refused it, but would bring deli sandwiches piled high with lettuce, pickles and onion paired with ginger beer that burned going down then eased his fragile stomach. 

His new place smelled good like lemons and care. A cleaner came by twice a month and he gave her generous tips each time, happy to disperse the money to someone who improved his surroundings. 

The burns and grafts and fractures and concussions wound their way to healing. His life was so different now that he could barely recall the old one, memories mixing into mud. 

The book went out to his agent, polished and cleaned by his friends’ harsh affection. Taken up there and thrown about until it landed in another agent’s lap. 

“I can make this into something,” Cheedo promised. 

Something more than the action jerkoff fantasies that his old agent had flogged him for, he heard her add in the quiet and was profoundly grateful. 

“I want a new name,” he told Capable. She was sitting on a stool pulled up to his kitchen’s island with an egg melting into a bowl of ramen. He had chopped spring onion and thin strips of fresh basil from the window box into it. 

She said that affection was a valuable ingredient and he believed her. 

“What kind of name?” 

“For the new book. So it’s all new together.” 

“New new new,” she repeated, a habit of hers to roll a word over her tongue. Chewing it. “New you. New you...” 

“When I was on morphine, I had a dream,” he admitted all at once, suddenly unable to stop the admission. “A crazy dream like one of my old books.” 

“Oh?” she rested the point of her chin in her hand. “Any good?” 

“Horrible. And amazing,” he bit his lower lip. “I was called Nux in the dream.” 

“What does it mean?” 

“Nothing, or I don’t know, maybe something.” 

“Was I in the dream?” 

“Yes,” he could feel the blush on his cheeks, the faintest echo of his burns. 

“Was I Capable in the dream?” 

“Yes. Furiosa and Max and the night nurse, she was The Dag....others too.” 

“Very Wizard of Oz of you.” 

“Never saw it,” he shrugged off her surprise. “But yes. You were Capable, always.” 

“Then you should be Nux,” she decided. 

“No last name?” 

“What for?”

“Say it again?” 

“Nux,” she broke the yolk open with her spoon, yellow sun bursting into dawn. “My Nux.” 

That night, she slept beside him for the first time, clad in one of his t-shirts. The pale hairless skin of her legs caressed his scar tissue and her breath flurried over his chest. Unwilling to disturb her, unable to sleep, he rested his nose at her temple and held all dreams at bay. 

This world was glory enough. 

Weekly Wild Books Review   
**_Forgetting Valhalla_ by Nux **

_The painful coming of age story focused on a young man without parents has been done to death. Lucky for the reader, the usual conventions are quickly forgone in favor of focus given to the amazing group of women that our unnamed protagonist falls into. His story takes a backseat to there’s as he turns from active hero to passive narrator, ultimately questioning if he ever knew what it meant to act courageously._


End file.
